Implementing a citizen-centric approach to delivering government services

Article from McKinsey & Company by Emma Dudley, Diaan-Yi Lin, Matteo Mancini and Jonathan Ng

Some pointers that I've got are:

Measuring citizen satisfaction

·         Transforming service delivery begins with understanding citizens’ needs and priorities. Identifying which services citizens find most problematic and measuring the extent of that dissatisfaction is one way governments can prioritize areas for improvement.

·         There are three guiding principles to ensure that citizen satisfaction measurement efforts generate accurate, actionable insights.

·         Let citizens tell you what matters most, but avoid asking them directly - Asking people which aspects of service delivery are most in need of improvement—the time required to resolve a request versus the politeness of staff, for example—is unlikely to yield accurate results. So rather than asking citizens to rank the importance of different drivers of satisfaction, ask them to rate each service (for example, the overall process of applying for a parking permit) across the drivers. This method provides more reliable insights into users’ needs and priorities.

·         Identify natural break points in customer satisfaction - Government leaders can find a balance between delivering high-quality, responsive services and managing resources effectively by using citizen-satisfaction metrics to determine acceptable service levels. One way to do that is by identifying break points—the point at which delays or service shortfalls cause customer satisfaction to drop significantly.

·         Combine public feedback with internal data to uncover hidden pain points - Combining customer-satisfaction information with operational data—call-center volumes and number of in-person visits, for instance—can yield additional insights, beyond what citizens state explicitly via surveys and other feedback channels. Employees can also be tremendously helpful in identifying pain points. Because they are closer to the front line and have extensive daily interactions with citizens, many employees are highly skilled at gauging public satisfaction and can often devise practical solutions. Employees are an especially important resource in circumstances that would make soliciting public feedback challenging.

Getting a detailed understanding of the entire citizen journey

·         A “citizen journey” is the entire experience that a person has when seeking a government service. The journey has a discrete beginning and end, and because it is typically multitouch and multichannel, it is also cross-functional in nature. A citizen journey is anchored in how people think about their experience, not in how government agencies do. Rather than focusing on improvements at individual touch points, government leaders can view services through the eyes of the constituent—this means considering the entire citizen journey, from the time the person begins looking for the agency that is best suited to meet a need until the task is completed. A journey-based approach to improving citizen satisfaction has three parts

·         Identify the journeys that matter most to citizens - To avoid spreading resources too thin, government leaders can focus improvement initiatives on what matters most to citizens. Identifying the most pressing journeys can be done in a number of ways, including segmenting customers by need (it’s not uncommon for a small group of constituents to lodge the majority of the complaints) and identifying areas with the highest overall levels of dissatisfaction.

·         Develop a map of how citizens experience those journeys - Once they have identified the journeys that matter most to citizens, leaders can create a map of each journey from the perspective of a citizen. Often, the process of creating these maps will reveal that a journey involves more steps—and more agencies—than leaders had realized. Different customers can experience the same journey in different ways, so it might be wise to create multiple maps to document the discrete needs of various groups.

·         Identify the internal processes that shape those journeys - To develop actionable insights, government leaders can link citizen journeys to the internal organizational processes that affect them. Therefore, an important part of effective journey mapping is defining the key operational activities and systems involved at each stage.

Translating improvement opportunities into front- and back-end solutions

·         The third step is to translate opportunities for improvement into actionable initiatives. Typically, these initiatives fall into one of three categories: managing demand better by preventing journeys that are unnecessary in the first place, cutting out duplicative steps along necessary citizen journeys, and improving the availability, usability, and accessibility of information.

·         Front-end initiatives have the most immediate impact on the citizen experience. Although leaders will want to tailor solutions so that they address the specific pain points they’ve identified through their mapping exercises, governments can consider using some of the following high-impact interventions.

·         Proactive notifications and status updates - Agencies that share information with citizens tend to realize greater levels of satisfaction while also reducing costs, in part because these communications divert demand from resource-intensive channels.

·         Improved functionality of self-serve channels - Citizens are increasingly expecting multichannel communication options and show a strong and growing preference for self-serve channels, such as online portals. Although government agencies have made advances in expanding the availability of self-serve online channels, uptake is often low, and few people find they can complete their journey online. Satisfaction drops significantly when citizens are unable to use their channel of choice and are forced to switch channels.

·         Polite, professional, and consistent communication - In-person and telephone channels still account for the majority of citizen interactions with their government. Staff who can provide clear, consistent, and courteous explanations and services are therefore critical to citizen satisfaction. Back-office operations are an equally important part of improving the citizen experience. In fact, speed, simplicity, and efficiency—factors largely driven by the back office—are often the most powerful drivers of citizen satisfaction. Since most customer journeys touch different parts of government, agencies may want to reorganize themselves and their relationships with other departments to create cross-functional teams responsible for the end-to-end customer journey.

Thinking long term

·         Capability building is a critical part of any transformation program. In the case of citizen-satisfaction transformations, government leaders can use a citizen-centric approach to designing performance management and governance systems so they can continue to drive—and sustain—improvements.

·         Measure and manage performance - When government leaders measure entire journeys, not just touch points, they might want to consider adjusting their performance metrics and analytics accordingly. This means not just capturing top-line citizen satisfaction with each journey but also their satisfaction with individual factors that affect satisfaction along the way; for example, not just the process of obtaining a permit but also the time it takes to do so. These metrics can then be embedded into a performance-management system. Of course, metrics and performance management are in many ways a means to an end—the ultimate goal is to promote continuous improvement. Citizencare forums can help. These forums consist of small, cross-functional teams of employees who review decisions that affect the public. Each forum reviews performance-management results, escalates issues to higher-level managers, and also directs feedback downward. Frontline-level forums can take the form of daily huddles to discuss results and resolve issues. Leadership-level forums could be quarterly meetings to review overall citizen service performance or to approve resource allocations.

·         Build the right governance system - Although governance models for citizen transformation programs can take different forms depending on the context in which they are operating, most have three things in common. First, they don’t just collect citizen feedback—they regularly aggregate and analyze this information, essentially “knitting together” a broad picture of the citizen experience. Second, because a single citizen journey can require multiple handoffs among departments or agencies, effective governance models define clear accountability across each function that is involved. Finally, citizen transformation governance models separate governance policy and operations. Policy governance focuses on top-line metrics and monitors overall quality of service to design and maintain a unified, positive citizen experience. Operational governance tracks citizen satisfaction and metrics at the channel and journey levels and encourages improvements by designing and carrying out customer-care initiatives at a process level.

Yours,

Something Small Thinking Big